Digital Delights

In a post on branch, Brian Oberkirch asks, Why are silos beating the light out of an open social Web? with some insightful points by Dave McClure. The biggest change I've seen in this debate over the years is a shift from "versus" to "leverage", and a recognition of the strengths of different approaches and in having a diversity of approaches.

First, let's dissect Dave's points one at a time:

"1) the problems we were interested in were only relevant to geeks"

This is a fair criticism of a lot of open social web work, though the seemingly obvious response was ironically worse. When open social web geeks attempted to prematurely design their technologies/solutions to attempt to work "for everyone" or for your (insert less tech-savvy family-member stereotype here), they ended up creating solutions that no one wanted for themselves, not even the geeks on their own websites. WebFinger is a prime example here.